The dictionary indicated that blackmail is a subset of extortion.
Naw, it didn't. When dictionaries indicate something as being a subset, the language is pretty explicit about it.
square: 2 : a rectangle with all four sides equal
baseball: a game played with a bat and ball between two teams of nine players each on a large field etc. etc.
spaghetti: 1 : pasta made in thin solid strings
Logic dictates that the phrasing does not on its own eliminate other possibilities. It indicated pretty explicitly that "blackmail is extortion or coercion by threat". The appended clause only talks about the form those threats sometimes take, but doesn't eliminate a broader use of the word, which is applicable to Mr. Gates's actions. Otherwise, it would have been stated less vaguely.
It's a vague definition, but it leaves open an interpretation in which extortion and blackmail are in some ways the same. In this situation, Mr. Gates attempted to coerce by threat. According to the dictionary, anyway, that's blackmail.
Check out Irrlicht. It's cross-platform, free, open-source, handles mesh imports from 3d studio max, maya, DirectX formats, and can import Quake 3 levels and Quake 2 models, amongst other things.
Or Blender, which has support for 3d game creation.
Or Ogre3d, which is more of a graphics engine than a game engine, but which can be used for game creation.
But I think irrlicht is the closest to what you're talking about.
I'll concede BZFlag doesn't have the graphical appeal that the mainstream games these days have. This problem will work itself out as the open source projects in general attract more artists. The artwork is catching up, though.
The problem is with a lot of those games there is no official support for Linux and the executables don't come on the disc.
Alright, but this is a different criticism, and one that will only go away when more "stupid" money is being thrown around, and people see that there might be a market in providing games support for Linux. Games-oriented Linux distros don't hurt, either. What does hurt is that we don't give them any exposure.
If those games are the best you can do, you are a REALLY LONG WAY from mainstream acceptance.
Point taken, but consider this. Look where we were 5 years ago. Look where we are now.
Now imagine where we'll be 5 years from now.
For the moment, the really, really impressive stuff is the graphics libraries. If nothing else, go check out Irrlicht's feature list. Before, we couldn't make good games because we didn't have the tools. Now, we have the tools, and the games are starting to come. Where do you think we'll be once the tools we have now had matured, and the community knows how to play with them? We'll be one or two years behind instead of five.
And that's just the OS community. We're not even talking about the Ids and the Unreals out there.
Sorry about that. Mentioned Vendetta twice. Hopefully the point is still clear, though.
Take an interest in what people are putting out there for you for ALREADY. Just go to Freshmeat and browse through the games being developed there. Find one that looks promising. Subscribe to it. Post a little something that says "this looks awesome".
Go to Linuxgames and check out the releases there. Go to HappyPenguin and have a look at the projects there. Check out the Game of the Month project and see if you can offer some help, even if it's only testing.
Got money? Vote with your wallet -- find a game that's being developed and isn't in danger of stagnation on sourceforge and donate. Give them half of what you'd pay for a commercial game in the genre. Consider what you're investing in -- tons of content, free updates, no subscription fees, etc.
Not impressed by any of the games? Fine. Donate to library-makers. Take a look at libsdl, clanlib, allegro, irrlicht, ogre3d, blender, crystal space, etc. These guys are putting out free tools for developers to use to make games. And they're bloody marvellous.
When a Linux version of a commercial game is published, if it looks interesting, BUY IT. Think about all that time that Loki had their balls hanging out there. Are you telling me that there wasn't some money you wasted on something else that couldn't have gone to them? Loki took a lot of flack for the way things went in the end, but IMO if there were more people willing to put their money where there mouth was, things would have worked out better for them -- they'd have found a way to survive.
Brag about what we have. Show that you're willing to pay to get even more of it. Don't complain about what we don't have.
Or don't. Most of the projects are going to keep working and working regardless of the lack of mainstream recognition. But if you'd like to be a part of the solution, the above advice is a start.
Here's my opinion. What "we" need are fewer people saying we need more games, and more people recognizing some of the excellent offerings we have right now. If we support these games (even with nothing more than just a little recognition), the companies WILL notice, see us as a market, and want to cater to us.
This isn't about providing a service to existing users, many of whom are, on average, probably a little more savvy than the average internet user. It's about getting new users who are used to using IE.
1. Firefox begins marketing efforts to showcase how easy it is to create toolbars for their browser. 2. Company that offers online shopping learns that it's a cinch to make a toolbar for their own company for Firefox. They figure, what the hell, and do it, and put a little link on their webpage saying that Firefox users can download this toolbar. 3. Person who knows little about Firefox goes to this company's website to do a little product browsing. 4. Person sees the link for the toolbar, thinks what the hell, and downloads Firefox to check it out, then downloads the toolbar. 5. User tells their friends how they like that Firefox has a toolbar for a company's website that they frequent. 6. Company now has a marketing method through people's browsers. Firefox now has a new user. And people who know about ctrl-l, or don't care about the above-mentioned company, don't have to bother getting the toolbar if they don't want it. Several winners, no real losers.
Everyone knows that Firefox is a great tool for the community (well, everybody who uses Firefox, anyway). What the Firefox people should try to in their marketing, though, is by showcasing how their openness can help corporations. If such toolbars could be easy as hell to make, a lot of companies with an online presence out there would be willing to give it a shot. Good for the company who has an easy way to search their products, good for firefox for being the middleman, good for the consumer who wants to search those products, and no harm to everybody else since you don't HAVE to install the toolbar...
I know it seems like the Sims would be a simple enough game to copy, but you have to look at what you'd need to surpass in order to become a player in this field. 1. A huge dedicated fan base with a lot of stupid money to spend. 2. 13,000 animations. 3. A polished game that's had several updates, before others have even attempted releasing their own first unpolished version.
Personally, number 2 is the big one, I think. Even the open source community might give it a go despite 1 and 3, but who has a motion capture system sitting in their basement and a staff to capture 13,000 animations? And I do think it would require a motion capture system for both (a) verisimilitude and (b) sanity of the people organizing the animations. Which means that you're pretty much limited to businesses, who might look at 1 and 3 above and think it's not worth it.
A computer is a tool, like a paintbrush, or a camera. Even if the computer is helping you get the content, remember that found art is often considered art.
Really, it's more of a question of whether or not it's good art, than art.
You're right about the 'z', and the 'k' sound is usually somewhere between our 'g' and 'k', and it does get a little bit harsher at the end of a syllable. What sometimes happens in Korean, though, is that when there is a syllable with a heavy-sounding consonant, it gets moved to the beginning of a new syllable with the "uh" vowel sound attached (sometimes "ee" with the 'j' consonant or 'ch' combo).
So, instead of "jerk" (with the 'j' sounding more like the soft 'g' in 'rouge'), it comes out as "jer-guh". 'Big' is sometimes "bi-guh", although if they choose to keep it in the same syllable, the 'g' sound, while more closely resembling a 'k', is barely audible by English-pronunciation standards, so it sounds less like "bik" and more like "bi". Same with 'bag' -- either 'ba-guh' or 'ba' (with only the faintest hint of a 'k' sound).
("orange" becomes "oran-jee" and "watch" becomes "wa-tchee", btw. It's tough to teach them out of that practice).
Which is assuming that the term started with them. I'd be surprised if 'zerg'-ing came from Korean, though, since they don't tend to treat their nouns as verbs (as much as English people do, anyway).
(Please note, this is mostly related to the way things are pronounced in Daegu (central Korea), and off television from Seoul. Other parts of Korea are known to have widely differing dialects.)
By that logic, you are declaring Evolution a religion...
I'm doing no such thing. You're confusing analogy with equivalence.
My point is that Christianity (specifically, Creationistic Christianity) is going outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour by trying to intrude on other disciplines. If the converse were done to them and their bibles, hopefully they could see the error in their ways.
Unlikely, though. Christianity's biggest problem, as Joseph Campbell pointed out, was that for Christians it's more important to believe the existence of Jesus, Adam and Eve, Satan, etc. than it is to understand the meaningful significance behind them.
While not all of the components of a basic computer are working yet, there is hope that some day ordinary students may be able to design living computers, producing everything from novel drugs to seeds that sprout into treehouses.
[Slashdot user looks up from sketchpad] What's that? Seeds that sprout into treehouses? Yeah, I suppose that could be useful.
you should be very happy to receive one or two patches in the first year.
Actually, I just got my first one yesterday (the project's only a week old, and I'm pretty flattered that somebody took the time to bother), but I don't know what to do with it! I'm pretty sure it's filename extension related, but that hasn't been a problem for me on any of the Windows machines, and I don't have access to a Linux box to check and see where the errors may be coming from and how to fix them.
I didn't want to clutter the submission with my own personal dumb questions, so here they are:
* All my development right now is on a Windows box. What's the best way to go about ensuring Linux/POSIX compatibility over the web? Compile farms? Recruiting a Linux maintainer?
* If I don't have access to my own server, where is the best place to host? Sourceforge (the only one I really know about) or somewhere else?
* Somebody's submitted a patch. What's the protocol for crediting them for the work?
* What are the criteria for determining whether or not something is "pre-alpha", "alpha", "beta", etc. Is there a set standard, or do I get to determine this on my own?
* How useful are wikis for OS projects?
* If I have legal questions regarding licenses or IP, who should I talk to?
Slashdot Mirror
The dictionary indicated that blackmail is a subset of extortion.
Naw, it didn't. When dictionaries indicate something as being a subset, the language is pretty explicit about it.
square: 2 : a rectangle with all four sides equal
baseball: a game played with a bat and ball between two teams of nine players each on a large field etc. etc.
spaghetti: 1 : pasta made in thin solid strings
Logic dictates that the phrasing does not on its own eliminate other possibilities. It indicated pretty explicitly that "blackmail is extortion or coercion by threat". The appended clause only talks about the form those threats sometimes take, but doesn't eliminate a broader use of the word, which is applicable to Mr. Gates's actions. Otherwise, it would have been stated less vaguely.
Kamsa hapneeda. To be fair, though, I've perfected my karma hooring ways under another pseud.
It's a vague definition, but it leaves open an interpretation in which extortion and blackmail are in some ways the same. In this situation, Mr. Gates attempted to coerce by threat. According to the dictionary, anyway, that's blackmail.
Mash 'em, boil 'em, stick 'em in a stew?
But stay away from Russia, where the taters eat you...
This post is likely going to get modded Offtopic. I blame you.
From m-w.com: Main Entry: blackmail ... 2 a : extortion or coercion by threats ...
Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
Check out Irrlicht. It's cross-platform, free, open-source, handles mesh imports from 3d studio max, maya, DirectX formats, and can import Quake 3 levels and Quake 2 models, amongst other things.
Or Blender, which has support for 3d game creation.
Or Ogre3d, which is more of a graphics engine than a game engine, but which can be used for game creation.
But I think irrlicht is the closest to what you're talking about.
I'll concede BZFlag doesn't have the graphical appeal that the mainstream games these days have. This problem will work itself out as the open source projects in general attract more artists. The artwork is catching up, though.
The problem is with a lot of those games there is no official support for Linux and the executables don't come on the disc.
Alright, but this is a different criticism, and one that will only go away when more "stupid" money is being thrown around, and people see that there might be a market in providing games support for Linux. Games-oriented Linux distros don't hurt, either. What does hurt is that we don't give them any exposure.
If those games are the best you can do, you are a REALLY LONG WAY from mainstream acceptance.
Point taken, but consider this. Look where we were 5 years ago. Look where we are now.
Now imagine where we'll be 5 years from now.
For the moment, the really, really impressive stuff is the graphics libraries. If nothing else, go check out Irrlicht's feature list. Before, we couldn't make good games because we didn't have the tools. Now, we have the tools, and the games are starting to come. Where do you think we'll be once the tools we have now had matured, and the community knows how to play with them? We'll be one or two years behind instead of five.
And that's just the OS community. We're not even talking about the Ids and the Unreals out there.
Sorry about that. Mentioned Vendetta twice. Hopefully the point is still clear, though.
Take an interest in what people are putting out there for you for ALREADY. Just go to Freshmeat and browse through the games being developed there. Find one that looks promising. Subscribe to it. Post a little something that says "this looks awesome".
Go to Linuxgames and check out the releases there. Go to HappyPenguin and have a look at the projects there. Check out the Game of the Month project and see if you can offer some help, even if it's only testing.
Got money? Vote with your wallet -- find a game that's being developed and isn't in danger of stagnation on sourceforge and donate. Give them half of what you'd pay for a commercial game in the genre. Consider what you're investing in -- tons of content, free updates, no subscription fees, etc.
Not impressed by any of the games? Fine. Donate to library-makers. Take a look at libsdl, clanlib, allegro, irrlicht, ogre3d, blender, crystal space, etc. These guys are putting out free tools for developers to use to make games. And they're bloody marvellous.
When a Linux version of a commercial game is published, if it looks interesting, BUY IT. Think about all that time that Loki had their balls hanging out there. Are you telling me that there wasn't some money you wasted on something else that couldn't have gone to them? Loki took a lot of flack for the way things went in the end, but IMO if there were more people willing to put their money where there mouth was, things would have worked out better for them -- they'd have found a way to survive.
Brag about what we have. Show that you're willing to pay to get even more of it. Don't complain about what we don't have.
Or don't. Most of the projects are going to keep working and working regardless of the lack of mainstream recognition. But if you'd like to be a part of the solution, the above advice is a start.
Unreal Doom3 HalfLife2 Enemy Territory Cube Savage Stratagus Freeciv Wesnoth NeverwinterNights Tribes2 Vendetta YohohoPuzzlePirates Civilization AlphaCentauri FrozenBubble Pydance Teg DeusEx BZFlag XPlane Flightgear Torcs Scorched3d Pingus Lincity Tuxcart Torcs Quake 123 VegaStrike Railz LBreakout Armagetron PPRacer Vendetta and there more impressive titles under development.
Here's my opinion. What "we" need are fewer people saying we need more games, and more people recognizing some of the excellent offerings we have right now. If we support these games (even with nothing more than just a little recognition), the companies WILL notice, see us as a market, and want to cater to us.
Who is behind "Activist Cash"?
Don't get me wrong, it does look like the UCS is partisan. But it's not like the rebuttal is coming from a totally neutral voice, either.
Scientists were saying the same thing just under a year ago...
This isn't about providing a service to existing users, many of whom are, on average, probably a little more savvy than the average internet user. It's about getting new users who are used to using IE.
1. Firefox begins marketing efforts to showcase how easy it is to create toolbars for their browser.
2. Company that offers online shopping learns that it's a cinch to make a toolbar for their own company for Firefox. They figure, what the hell, and do it, and put a little link on their webpage saying that Firefox users can download this toolbar.
3. Person who knows little about Firefox goes to this company's website to do a little product browsing.
4. Person sees the link for the toolbar, thinks what the hell, and downloads Firefox to check it out, then downloads the toolbar.
5. User tells their friends how they like that Firefox has a toolbar for a company's website that they frequent.
6. Company now has a marketing method through people's browsers. Firefox now has a new user. And people who know about ctrl-l, or don't care about the above-mentioned company, don't have to bother getting the toolbar if they don't want it. Several winners, no real losers.
Everyone knows that Firefox is a great tool for the community (well, everybody who uses Firefox, anyway). What the Firefox people should try to in their marketing, though, is by showcasing how their openness can help corporations. If such toolbars could be easy as hell to make, a lot of companies with an online presence out there would be willing to give it a shot. Good for the company who has an easy way to search their products, good for firefox for being the middleman, good for the consumer who wants to search those products, and no harm to everybody else since you don't HAVE to install the toolbar...
I know it seems like the Sims would be a simple enough game to copy, but you have to look at what you'd need to surpass in order to become a player in this field. 1. A huge dedicated fan base with a lot of stupid money to spend. 2. 13,000 animations. 3. A polished game that's had several updates, before others have even attempted releasing their own first unpolished version.
Personally, number 2 is the big one, I think. Even the open source community might give it a go despite 1 and 3, but who has a motion capture system sitting in their basement and a staff to capture 13,000 animations? And I do think it would require a motion capture system for both (a) verisimilitude and (b) sanity of the people organizing the animations. Which means that you're pretty much limited to businesses, who might look at 1 and 3 above and think it's not worth it.
"Art is deliberately created in every aspect."
Even James Joyce couldn't state a definition of art this altruistic. From Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man...
"-If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood, Stephen continued, make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not?"
"-That's a lovely one, said Lynch, laughing again. That has the true scholastic stink."
A computer is a tool, like a paintbrush, or a camera. Even if the computer is helping you get the content, remember that found art is often considered art.
Really, it's more of a question of whether or not it's good art, than art.
That's an early flowchart from the MFC design team.
You're right about the 'z', and the 'k' sound is usually somewhere between our 'g' and 'k', and it does get a little bit harsher at the end of a syllable. What sometimes happens in Korean, though, is that when there is a syllable with a heavy-sounding consonant, it gets moved to the beginning of a new syllable with the "uh" vowel sound attached (sometimes "ee" with the 'j' consonant or 'ch' combo).
So, instead of "jerk" (with the 'j' sounding more like the soft 'g' in 'rouge'), it comes out as "jer-guh". 'Big' is sometimes "bi-guh", although if they choose to keep it in the same syllable, the 'g' sound, while more closely resembling a 'k', is barely audible by English-pronunciation standards, so it sounds less like "bik" and more like "bi". Same with 'bag' -- either 'ba-guh' or 'ba' (with only the faintest hint of a 'k' sound).
("orange" becomes "oran-jee" and "watch" becomes "wa-tchee", btw. It's tough to teach them out of that practice).
Which is assuming that the term started with them. I'd be surprised if 'zerg'-ing came from Korean, though, since they don't tend to treat their nouns as verbs (as much as English people do, anyway).
(Please note, this is mostly related to the way things are pronounced in Daegu (central Korea), and off television from Seoul. Other parts of Korea are known to have widely differing dialects.)
By that logic, you are declaring Evolution a religion...
I'm doing no such thing. You're confusing analogy with equivalence.
My point is that Christianity (specifically, Creationistic Christianity) is going outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour by trying to intrude on other disciplines. If the converse were done to them and their bibles, hopefully they could see the error in their ways.
Unlikely, though. Christianity's biggest problem, as Joseph Campbell pointed out, was that for Christians it's more important to believe the existence of Jesus, Adam and Eve, Satan, etc. than it is to understand the meaningful significance behind them.
Dear Creationists,
We'll put these stickers on our science textbooks when you put "God's existence is a theory, not a fact" on your bibles.
While not all of the components of a basic computer are working yet, there is hope that some day ordinary students may be able to design living computers, producing everything from novel drugs to seeds that sprout into treehouses.
[Slashdot user looks up from sketchpad] What's that? Seeds that sprout into treehouses? Yeah, I suppose that could be useful.
[Goes back to designing Angelina Jolie X7c]
you should be very happy to receive one or two patches in the first year.
Actually, I just got my first one yesterday (the project's only a week old, and I'm pretty flattered that somebody took the time to bother), but I don't know what to do with it! I'm pretty sure it's filename extension related, but that hasn't been a problem for me on any of the Windows machines, and I don't have access to a Linux box to check and see where the errors may be coming from and how to fix them.
I didn't want to clutter the submission with my own personal dumb questions, so here they are:
* All my development right now is on a Windows box. What's the best way to go about ensuring Linux/POSIX compatibility over the web? Compile farms? Recruiting a Linux maintainer?
* If I don't have access to my own server, where is the best place to host? Sourceforge (the only one I really know about) or somewhere else?
* Somebody's submitted a patch. What's the protocol for crediting them for the work?
* What are the criteria for determining whether or not something is "pre-alpha", "alpha", "beta", etc. Is there a set standard, or do I get to determine this on my own?
* How useful are wikis for OS projects?
* If I have legal questions regarding licenses or IP, who should I talk to?
"10-foot pole" in a discussion on porn isn't a term I'm going to touch with a...